Selling hopes and dreams on a bluray disc. Truly they were detrimental to society. I used to hate the world but then I realized that those works of distilled moe and Iyashikei that I enjoyed were made by other people:

The voices that aroused my passions were acted out by other peopleThe dialogue was written by a writer who had that idea of moe in his/her heartThe studio who created the show I liked was a whole team on the same page and on a mission to spread that feeling across the worldPosters on Zag Forums were people who shared the wish of a better world by enjoying works like K-on

Every and any hobby that consumes its user is like a drug, when you think about it. These are "vices" that every one has and has a multitude of. Whether it's fishing or watching moe, sinking into a cave of books or manga, being a professional swimmer or an avid stamp collector. Everyone has these passions, and all these passions are a way of escaping the mundane rat race, just like a drug. Everyone throws key words to the wind when in conversation, hoping the other party will pick up on them and reveal that they too share the same interests. Being an otaku is part of the human condition.

Maybe the real problem is the fact that a market exists for these fantasies in the first place. Instead of going after those who look for something better in anime, maybe they should divert those energies towards making reality a better place to live, so that these otaku they criticize so much can have meaningful lives. But no, it's much easier to be some butthurt boomer and criticize the bottom of the social ladder for not manning up to "face reality".

Well, it isn't completely false. Just like drugs, anime is used to run away from real life, however calling otaku weak people is completely misunderstanding them. I had a rather fulfilling school life, but I have never been a school gang leader or had a harem. Most people haven't. But anime gives you opportunity to experience all that and a lot more. I would gladly throw away my life for isekai, because it's just better. And it isn't a problem of me being shit, it's a problem of reality being imperfect and sucking, compared to fantasy. Just as it should.

July 30, 2019 - 04:50

Asher Gomez

Probably not entirely untrue. What you going to do about that? Are you offering to make me happy, Mr Professor?

July 30, 2019 - 04:54

Easton Anderson

Thought he was just mad about trains.

July 30, 2019 - 04:56

Cameron Morris

He was only aiming at creating a negative emotional response from response because of how drugs are portrayed in Japan.

from the students* I meantFuck posting on 8ch first thing in the morning.

July 30, 2019 - 05:28

Nolan Butler

This. And there's nothing unhealthy about it. The only people who say that are those who either can't stomach seeing someone else genuinely enjoy something they can't understand or who want to attain a moral highground by condemning someone else.

July 30, 2019 - 06:19

Carson Bailey

Doesn't that professor realize that all the trendy new prognostications and pearl clutching about society rely on epidemiology? Not only is this an intellectually dishonest comparison, it's not even one that keeps up with the times. I'll give it a try.

The argument form "X is like drugs" is like a disease. Those most likely to use this argument form are the "weak" of society, composed of those lacking reasoning skills, those consumed by apathy, and those trying to seek status. College and university professors are disproportionately at risk to succumbing to this argument form, and should be approached with caution. As noted, this argument form is aided by posturing that humans engage and can be frequently seen piggybacking on healthy arguments in healthy discussions. The resulting discussion ends up compromised while the argument form spreads itself to new victims. Once afflicted, the new carriers will continually generate new instances of this argument form if they fit the aforementioned "weak" category. People may be inoculated against this argument form by being exposed to weaker strains of it, such as "anime is like drugs", in order to build up resistance. At present there is no known cure for this argument form. Intentionally reducing the total number of arguments generated from this form by not writing clickbait has the highest efficacy rates without serious side effects.

Blaming society's problems on anime is like a drug. What is otherwise a complex problem is easily simplified while offering a scapegoat.

When such anime consumers are the scapegoat, the real problem roots of society grow deeper. Because the scapegoat and the guilty are different things that which such accusations get blurred at the cost of making justice disappear.By getting addicted to the naïve lyric of a world where complex suffering causing problems are solved by blaming anime, it's the same as getting addicted to a drug.Have you taken a realistic look of the world around you, and the absolute difficulty of some problems that took generations of accumulated research to even get at the beginning of the solution? (Example being the conundrum of Thomas Malthus Demographic/Food Pressure and invention of Fertilizers to bypass that, or diseases fatal diseases that took centuries of waiting until a cure was found either due to trial and error (penicillin) or accumulated research.Blaming the state of the world on basic anime is like a drug. That is why the Professor is as guilty as everyone else. He should quit his mental habit of finding scapegoats which is like a drug that helps the real culprit remain hidden.

July 30, 2019 - 10:33

Easton Cook

All forms of media provide an escape from reality, that is in itself not a problem. The issue is that there is a growing amount of people who drown themselves in media. They refuse to participate in society and face reality. Putting all the blame on companies exploiting this phenomenon isn't going to solve this problem, because they did not create this problem. The individuals himself and the society are to blame. The individual for giving up in face of hardship and the society for failing to provide a safety net for those individuals. The teacher shouldn't scapegoat anime, but instead warn his student about the hardships of life and help those who may need it.

No, apparently he thought that Free was based on the light novel he sent into KyoAni, who were extra jewish that day and didn't buy it from him. I of course have no idea if there is any truth to it, but apparently that's what the attacker believed.

That same mother would complain if the kid decided to go out and build a log cabin today "it's unsafe" she would say " we can't watch them 24/7 if they are in the woods" she would say.

July 30, 2019 - 18:03

Ayden Martin

Do you have the rest of these?

July 30, 2019 - 20:35

Jayden Rivera

The thing is, whether you like it or not, he's right.

We live in a world right now devoid of any meaning, any real substance. Most people are hedonistic, materialistic, and essentially waste their lives. Growing up, we loved the "hero's journey" because it was simple and clear. There was an enemy to fight, whether a dragon or a wizard, treasures to be found, a road to follow. Right now, there is no journey. There is no road. There are no countries to conquer, real wars to fight, anything of substance to dedicate our lives to, to be part of something greater. That's why you see so many people in these so called "social revolution" movements, creating drama and progressing things to the point of absurdity, just to feel important, to feel like they are contributing to something great.

The reality of most people's lives is shallow nonsense, working their lives away, with nothing whatsoever to look forward to. In the past, the promise of marriage was enough to keep men in the system. Now, even that is gone. Reality sucks; it's hard, seemingly meaningless, and the concepts we idealized in our childhood media, like "true friendship" and "true love" can never be realized. For most people, their lives will be nothing but work, and if they are lucky, they might find a partner who has slept with hundreds of other people (destroying their ability to pair bond with you, love you, they will always compare you) and have 1 or 2 kids born to suffer the same fate. There is nothing there. That's the problem. There is simply nothing there for most people, and that's why they try to leave.

The reason there are so many young men dropping out of society today is precisely because they have came to the exact same conclusions. They see no point in working their lives away for nothing. So, many kill themselves. The rest cannot bear to face reality, and retreat inwards, where it is safer. These people immerse themselves in media; some live vicariously through the lives of celebrities, some obsess over politics, some play games to feel a sense of achievement, reward, and a life that is actually interesting, some try to replace a lack of real human connection and friendship by talking to others online, and some watch anime. Anime is perhaps the most powerful form of escapism ever created. You have perfect worlds, where every day is a grand adventure. Women in anime are a male fantasy, in the sense that they love you for your personality rather than your looks, they are supportive, they love unconditionally, they will not cheat on you, they actually love you. In anime, you have a group of friends who have your back no matter what. You are loved, accepted, and you belong. Real life, where only looks matter, people are shallow, and your friends are just people you waste time with, instead of people who actually like you and would help you in a crisis, is garbage by any comparison.

The sad reality is, you are more likely to kill yourself then die by the hands of an enemy soldier, famine, drought, etc, in the West. For the people who seem to have the highest quality of life, who seem to have everything, we instead have nothing. I will never starve, I will never fear for my life, never worry about shelter and safety, but that does not make a life worth living. With everything so restricted, you must say, do, and think the right things, to participate in society as a "normal person". There are pressures and expectations on you. You have to work a soul-crushing job your whole life. No one will ever love you, really love you. Your friends are really only with you because you have the same social status, you don't really know them, like them, but you keep them around.

Anime is the rejection of all that. You are loved, you are the great hero who does legendary things, your world is amazing. Japan is simply late-stage Western society, so no wonder they developed Anime. The end result is a nation which lives, yet in truth is already dead, where the citizens would rather use escapism with every second of their free time than live in reality. These hikki-types are the inevitable product.

For anyone who doubts what I'm saying, or anyone on this board, try not practicing escapism for a week, or even a day. No books, no internet, no games, no movies, no shows, no anime, no daydreaming, nothing. You will quickly realize how much of your "life" is online. I fell into a deep depressive state when I tried it, because you are forced to face reality, forced to face your doubts, fears, and insecurities instead of shoving them away constantly. The truth is, in a world without meaning, you are left to make it for yourself. The first step is to embrace reality.

While KyoAni did occasionally produce something good (FMP being one example), most of their products were bland, soulless shit. Granted in the cases such as K-On! the source material itself was major limiting factor, but that still does not excuse the garbage end product. There's nothing memorable about entire series but a blurry mess that blends together after the time which some people on this board will excuse in name of conformism while repeating memes like fun things are fun. Entire "cure girls doing cute things" niche is pretty much reverse of fujoshi fantasyland: safe world where objects of desire interact with each other and their opposite gender has little to no presence. This allows the viewer who are too scared of interaction even even in their fantasies - fujoshi or her otaku equivalent depending on whether show is like Free or K-on! both apply- to fulfill their fantasies safely. This is why you have both fujoshits sperging about girls and otaku doing the same about boys when their fantasies are threatened (Tokyo Ghoul spergout being an example of former while the great Otaku chimpout siege on mangaka that dared to have non-virgin female heroine example of latter). I just wonder how many anons here would have completely flipped their shit if K-on! girl(s) romance with boys of their age had been included as significant story arc.

I dunno man. I enjoy sitting around on the deck on the hammock with a decent drink talking shit and what we're gonna do the next day with the other two there while doing absolutely nothing of note.

I'd give it less than ten before that.

July 30, 2019 - 21:48

Jason Cox

I actually built a den in the woods when I was a kid. Some adults found it and demolished it because it was "unsafe", probably.

July 30, 2019 - 21:49

Ian Ramirez

If the girls started speaking about boys in the first few episodes, and then they started introducing love interests, then nobody would complain, because that's to be expected. If everything was the same, except that the second half of the second season the story is suddenly about the girls chasing some random boys we never saw before, then there's a problem. You see, that's a completely different genre, and switching genres is not nice. Look at the Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo thread, some people do voice their dislike for the show, but even they can accept that the show is about a bunch of girls engaging with the idea of boys and sex.

July 30, 2019 - 21:49

Ryder White

I have a bunch I will dump in no particular order.

Good post, but it's worth mentioning that you generalize anime too much. Not all of it is the shameless wish fulfillment you make it sound like.Also disagree with your conclusion. I don't think this reality is worth embracing, and it's a fool's errand to try and fix it when much more powerful forces are at work trying to destroy it at the same time. I'd rather serve in heaven.

I can't stop thinking the main reason why she is single is because she has unrealistic expectations about the men she deserves to have as her husband.

July 30, 2019 - 22:11

Hudson Harris

A lot of women do these days.

July 30, 2019 - 22:13

Evan Bailey

Standing on the train platform after work about to go to my part time job and I feel like crying. Thanks for posting these I guess

July 30, 2019 - 22:19

Jack Price

There's nothing wrong with escapism and wish-fulfillment.Complaining about those things in anime is the very definition of "no fun allowed".

If I could fix the real world I would, but people can't even agree on what the problem is. The only certainty is that it's systematic and exists at a scale far beyond the ability of any individual human to control. All any of us can do is wait for the whole system to shake itself apart and then try to pick up the pieces afterwards.

Master: Beautiful, is it not? These lights are one of the betas' cities. But these are not ordinary betas, I have modified them slightly. Betas, you call them carbons. Though artificially created, in the end they may be closer to... people, than you think. The people living there know thirst, hunger, disease, they suffer all these things and in the end, they grow old and die. But for one brief moment, they shine as bright as the sun. Because they know these hardships, they also know the meaning of happiness. Compared to theirs, our perfect world is cold and sterile. I'd like to ask you, to do something for me, MegaMan. Can you take me there? What do you say?

MegaMan: Take you there? What? Wait! I-I know him...he's the Master! I-I remember now...I came here! I came here to Terra with the Master! And then...then...uh....uh...oh...

MEGAMAN WITH THE MASTER AGAIN:Master: Listen. To the sounds of every day life. The sounds of city life. The smell, of evening meals being prepared. All this and more we in Elysium have lost. Thank you, MegaMan. Thanks to you, I have finally been able to experience this for myself. For 3,000 years, I have been free from hardship and pain. A life of luxury and ease obeying my heart's desires. Seeing these people, grateful for the simple joys of life, I wonder, was I truly happy? I have made up my mind, MegaMan. Carry out my final command. I want you to destroy the System. I realize now that we were wrong. Correct my mistake. Make things right again.

Master (handing a card-like device to MegaMan): This is, a good luck charm. As long as you have it, no one can stop or harm you. Return to Elysium. Delete all data from the Library, you understand? Please, MegaMan.

MASTER'S FINAL WORDS TO MEGAMAN INSIDE DATA:MegaMan: Ma-Master...

Master: Hm! It looks as though...My time has finally come. I know I cannot survive long outside of Elysium. Goodbye, MegaMan. Thank you for all you have done for me...All these many years...I go now, into the arms of life...true Mother...

If you build paradise, its residents will tear it down just to have something to fight for. Painlessness is a pain itself; you cannot escape suffering, so all there is to do is suffer towards something worth achieving.

Meanwhile an eminent professor of the Osaka University of Physics has discovered that water is wet.

"Diversion" is a synonym for "hobby" as in it's a diversion to avoid to think about life which is what human do when left to their own devices. And if they do it too much it's usually called "depression".

July 30, 2019 - 23:06

Ryan Cooper

So much bullshit in one post I don't even know where to start, or if I should I even bother.You are projecting your own faults outwards and assume that the whole world follows in your meaningless course. It is not so. You are assuming outward "reality" is the base line from which all experience stems, yet it is exactly the opposite. Our reality stems from inside, what the individual works on inwards, is what is ultimately projected outwards. Unfortunately, the mass consciousness has the more effect than the few autists who grasp at Eternity.Your idea that "reality" is working for a living and going through the hoops is preposterous when it is indeed just as much escapism as anything else. The ratrace is the bad kind of escapism. Want to practice reality for a change? Go sit on the beach and stare at the ocean without thinking about anything else for an entire day. You can have all of this at any time if you wanted to experience it, yet you don't. You want the world to align itself perfectly and roll out the red carpet for you without you having to lift a finger. You are a person that's completely absorbed by the illusory material realm and you have given up on the Hero's Journey.

Not that user, but starving yourself just to feel it is missing the point completely. Of course we could inflict any number of hardships on ourselves willingly. That will never change. The problem is that it's willingly. There's nothing to actually fight for. Nothing that is both imposing harm on us that overlaps with the realm of things we might be able to do something about. Our villains are abstracts, like 'cancer' or 'heart disease', or 'pollution'. None of these appease the basic human need to improve our conditions, even if we triumph over any of them.

The world is, for the most part, handled. And the things that come for us are the things we have to entrust to others to handle. Even if you're the one in a million who have the know-how to treat cancer, you won't, out of professional protocol. We're a society of adolescents in the West because all of our problems are outsourced, just like a kid.

Shooting yourself in the foot by choice and calling it hardship is just as self-delusional as escaping into anime or video games. You've gone out of your way to place yourself under the specter of an adversary of your own invention just to feel something.

July 30, 2019 - 23:14

Jacob Edwards

Nevermind hardships. How about the struggle to just meet and make connections with people who are genuinely nice and interesting? That's the whole appeal of the SoL genre, isn't it? Just spending some time in a world where people are pleasant.

July 30, 2019 - 23:29

Oliver Reed

Alternatively you could just stop being a faggot and take it easy, and go through life not giving a fuck about the meaningless affairs of humans.

Anyway I disagree about shooting yourself in the foot "willingly". Because it could be argued that you just as willingly are trapping yourself in a world of safe and bleak mediocrity. You could leave it all behind this instant if you wanted to.

July 30, 2019 - 23:30

Aaron Carter

There is a road, an enemy, and there are things that do give life meaning. Its just all of the burdens of modern society have opened people's eyes and given them apathy for trying to grasp true meaning to it as they have seen the futility of trying to get and honest job, women, lifestyle, etc. We have the technology to make the world better but money and bureaucracy get in the way. We have the connections to talk about the real issues, but most people will want to remain willfully ignorant until it's spammed at them 24/7. When people try to be a hero they just get gunned down or arrested (for life + 999 years) by the police, [insert gov. authority of choice], etc. and watch as everyone around them just pretends he was the bad guy and not look deeper into what kind of society pushed him to that point. We have seen too many of these examples and still people drag others down over petty reasons like "do it for the money", sue, berate people for even trying to elevate the situation. So many fucking problems that everyone is divided because they don't know where to start fixing the problem. Society has become numb to it all. It then, again, leads to a crazy outcast to try to do [insert crazy claim here] because "what else do they have to lose".I rambled and I completely lost track of what you were trying to say but I don't think it's lack of purpose but it is that with the spread of information a persons realization to a problem he feels he must fix are too big and incestuously connected to everything else it seems like a pointless farce compared to fairytales where one guy comes in and fixes everything with one simple goal in mind.

This just some psuedo intellectual bullshit. Master should have given Megaman a speed boat. Have you every seen anyone frown on a speedboat?

Kind of an anecdote, but someone had one of those "text-to-speech reads highlights from a Reddit thread" YouTube videos up at work today. The topic was "foreigners, what was the biggest surprise about visiting the USA?" Aside from some predictables (portion sizes, tipping, etc), the recurring theme I kept hearing was being stunned at how friendly we are. Apparently it's a distinctly American thing to just chat up random strangers in public, and southern hospitality left even the Canadians a bit stunned at how polite and helpful we are. I wonder if we aren't living in the slice of life world right now, but are too caught up in overhyped minutia to notice. There's certainly an industry or two that exists entirely on convincing people they're in a civil war already.

I'm getting mixed messages here. Is human experience meaningless, or isn't it? That has to be sorted out before we can even discuss the veracity of self-inflicted pain being a meaningful experience of hardship.

I stand thoroughly corrected.

Seriously, though, Mega Man deals a lot with the price of utopia and was clearly partially inspired by Russian revolutionary-era literature. It directly discusses Crime and Punishment briefly in the Rockman Zero drama tracks.

July 30, 2019 - 23:47

Jason Jenkins

Modern human society is cut off from the source. It is not human experience that is meaningless, it is the false notion that modern human society IS human experience, when all it is is bullshit and has been bullshit for thousands of years. The few people who have this figured out either run the world or are living on the fringes.I don't understand what you people are complaining about "nothing to fight for." There is plenty to fight for, all the time. Is it that you need [insert figure of authority] to tell you "X is bad and we must fight it!" If you're rotting inside and you can still imagine a better world then there is something left to fight for.

July 30, 2019 - 23:59

Eli Barnes

Start a civil war/go after the powerful

July 31, 2019 - 00:59

Daniel Barnes

Damn, you people are moronic. Every single one of you.

July 31, 2019 - 01:01

Camden Johnson

Suck a cock. It's been said a million times.

The article is right, but please kill yourself, you utter fucking pseud.

It's not a problem that can be "fixed". Human growth, strength, and resilience are born from pain, conflict, and struggle. It's human nature to seek comfort, to want to avoid that which causes us harm. Our minds are made to condition us towards what feels good: think of Pavlov's Dogs if you will. Having a shouting match with someone makes you feel bad. Running away from, or avoiding a shouting match gives you a sense of relief. So you'll keep trying to avoid shouting matches because shouting feels bad, and not shouting feels good. Easy to follow so far? What happens when you apply this concept to other parts of human life? You try to take the easy way out, to make things better, to decrease the difficulties in life, to make things convenient. And this continues on throughout generations, uninterrupted. What is the result of this? Parents who never had to struggle, and see danger/risk as something to be avoided at all costs. Which makes for terribly weak children who grow up safe, unused to pain, conflict, and never had to struggle.

I don't care much about history, but I know that too many generations without any meaningful pressure caused great harm to many civilizations. The clearest example of this is Western society, with the WW1 and WW2 generations being a strong generation, and now in [current year] we're stuck with a society where there's not only a market for escapism (which also happens to be a major market on the worldwide scale), but we're stuck with a society where a lot of adults can drown themselves in escapism without having to struggle to survive. Too many safety nets, not enough sink or swim. You want someone to blame for otakus turning their backs on society? Blame their parents and grandparents for making the world so easy to live in that turning one's back on society is so damn easy and convenient.

July 31, 2019 - 05:25

Brody Bell

Really, this professor's biggest mistake is singling out Kyoani to throw the drug thing at, if anything they're the studio that does the least of that.

July 31, 2019 - 06:07

Ayden Collins

His biggest mistake is using this event to make his retarded arguments, and they are retarded. There is nothing wrong with anime depicting cool settings that people wish they could partake in for real in general.

July 31, 2019 - 10:46

Brayden Stewart

Come now user. Don't take out your frustration on your forebearers who didn't have the 20/20 hindsight you have now. You said it yourself that those of the WW1 and WW2 generations were strong, but that's only those who survived. Men can be strengthened by times of struggle, but there's always a toll to pay, and this time it was too much. We live in a peace obsessed decadent age now because we just emerged from an age with the bloodiest most apocalyptic wars humanity has ever seen. The well intended but naive solution was to put western civilization on the path of stability at any cost. The cost, I'm sure, is something you already understand thoroughly. This is what happens when the pendulum swings backward, but to freeze any particular frame in its motion and point out a cause or tipping point is folly, for the pendulum's dance has gone on for all of human history.

Indeed, those who have fully conquered themselves are the most dangerous to the current system. Once a man who is both intelligent and has an incredible set of balls comes forth we will see some serious shit. The myth of insurmountable odds only has a hold over weak men, such as most of us. Some of us have the potential to become strong men with sufficient will and bravery, but how fast?

July 31, 2019 - 15:38

Connor Foster

/a needs to be real careful for the "Day of the Rope" types. They tend to prey on otakus with the promise of not needing escapism, not terribly unlike how the Aum Shinrikyo did.

July 31, 2019 - 15:44

Levi Garcia

It's more me worrying that a series of civil wars will radiate off of a US one. It's really me mentally preparing for the possibility of having to survive in such a situation. Fear drives me to numerous types of escapism but there is a counter-fear of how too much time in escapism could get me killed.

July 31, 2019 - 15:58

Ryan Diaz

An otaku who abandons his escapism because he no longer "needs" it was never an otaku to begin with. If a genie turned you into a chad right now would you forsake your waifu and start chasing 3DPD?

No, no, you misunderstand. I mean to say they'll offer an alternative to it, or even the same lifestyle but with a purpose. The transition to "I'll kill anyone who says Marino-chan isn't the best" to "I'll kill anyone who says the Leader is wrong" is not a hard one to make.

July 31, 2019 - 16:07

Benjamin Powell

I just find the whole "decline of civilization" discussion tiresome and annoying.Yes, the world's fucked, but nobody here is likely to have an accurate understanding of why it's fucked.I'm here to talk about anime and manga - not read people's political speculation and/or preaching.

July 31, 2019 - 16:11

Carter Walker

I apologize for bringing it up. Just be careful out there, bois. There's people out there looking to use you.

July 31, 2019 - 16:15

Noah Rodriguez

No, I agree with you. I'm more annoyed by posters like or .

July 31, 2019 - 16:16

Cameron Turner

Granted, but this is a thread about social issues relating to anime. What did you think was going to happen? Bring up the topic of escapism, and what will follow is a discussion of why there's such a desire for escapism. Either cut this thread off when it arises, or let it play out.

I thought it was a thread for making fun of of a philosophy professor at an art university. It's worth noting the professor actually called Kyoani worse than drug dealers. Someone archived the original article if anyone wants to read it. It seems like it was heavily edited to basically be a five paragraph history lesson before it was removed. Here's the original. It's three pages long, so don't just read the first page and think you're done. archive.is/JeyCA

None of it addresses fiction as escapism outside of anime with a school setting. The guy seemingly has no problem with fantasy anime or sci-fi - anything with a "mature" setting - just this "endless everyday" as he calls it. He also basically blames Kyoani for creating the guy that set the fire. That those who become addicted the dream of such a life will be left behind by real life. When they eventually realize this they will try to make that dream a reality. After they fail to turn their lives around, since they have no life skills due to watching too much school life anime, they will lose their minds and try to take as many people as possible with them in a suicidal terrorist attack.